MS CLAKE IS DOING A PHD WITH LUKE KENNARD AT BIRMINGHAM UNIVERSITY, ON THE FEMINIST ABSURD IN AMERICAN AND BRITISH POETRY JENNA CLAKE I...

Saturday, 26 March 2016

POEM BY TODD SWIFT, EASTER SATURDAY

MYSTERIUM PASCHALEIt happens like thisin writing, a manis brought to a hill to be raisedto die in springso that God's willbe done. Never kill alone,use Romans when you can,and let care down by a kiss.I am born in wordsand reborn reading; when the inkfrom the black well spills.These trees here are tornbetween bliss and dismay, it is confusinghow the world is making progresseven as it staggers backon one bleakest Saturday;a chasm opens like a speechthe monster of all creation makesbut that is a volcanic belchinstead; God is dead to live,the twisting snakery of organiseddeception at the tricked hingeof Easter, where the magicis love's risk of everything.But fixed. Stacked. A housethat knows its odds. I never complainthat Christ rises on the Sunday,it is good theatre and good news.It is truce with warring nature;why spar with Caesar forever?The people who said nobecome those who say yes, later.The mob is just indifferentignorance; it gets confused,as I say, when sung or spoken;it is a story, not a truth.It is Truth, happening all at onceand everywhere like a stormso big it lifts a hemisphere.I forgive those who hissed and nailed.Our God was impaled, he sufferedso that God knows what we dowhen we die. We are the painhe endured, unified in injustice.You ask why discomforts must occurto be experienced even by God?A child without water, a desert hotas coals and no wheat or river there:the world was made in confusion,this is certain, it is particularlycreative and dense, and packedwith motion and processions;never reverses; flows, and alters,as do minds, and souls. It occurs,the world, as does a work of art;it has, even, a sort of heart.And so, this cannot be stopped,as one stops a clock to change time.That would not be freedom, only artifice;we would be golden statuesin a pearl garden under a jade sky.No movement and no chance to changeor learn. Dying here is what changemakes happen as its form.The wind dices for the skein of thingsthat cannot be rent apart, whole;Ice in the heart of the lawdid not even thaw for Jesus.We have one weather for our God,one sky, one cruel domain,it is the same, it is the one that sawour tender Lord both fall and fly.BY TODD SWIFTEASTER SATURDAY, 2016